2009 National Book Award Winner,
Young People's Literature

Phillip
Hoose

Claudette Colvin: Twice
Toward Justice

Phillip Hoose
receiving with 2009 National Book Award in Young People's
Literature.

Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading

Photo credit: Portland
Press-Herald

CITATION

How could we not know of this
courageous teenager and her remarkable contribution
to the U.S. civil rights movement? Phillip Hoose’s
riveting and intelligent portrait incorporates photographs
and other galvanizing primary source illustrations,
as well as Claudette Colvin’s own voice, to draw
the reader fully into 1950s Montgomery, Alabama. Compellingly
written and skillfully structured, this important work
captures a time and place of struggle, oppression, and
resistance as it reaffirms Colvin’s hard-earned
and nearly lost place in history.

ABOUT THE BOOK

On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled
teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman
on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Shouting
“It’s my constitutional right!” as
police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided
she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws
that had angered and puzzled her since she was a child.

But instead of being celebrated,
as Rosa Parks would be when she took the same stand
nine months later, Claudette found herself shunned by
many of her classmates and dismissed as an unfit role
model by the black leaders of Montgomery. Undaunted,
she dared to challenge segregation again a year later—as
one of the four plaintiffs in the landmark busing case,
Browder v. Gayle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr. Hoose is an award-winning
author of books, essays, stories, songs, and articles.
Although he first wrote for adults, he turned his attention
to children and young adults in part to keep up with
his own daughters.

His children’s book Hey,
Little Ant (Tricycle Press, 1998), inspired by
his daughter Ruby and co-authored by his daughter Hannah,
received a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

His It’s Our World,
Too!: Stories of Young People Who Are Making a Difference
(Little, Brown, 1993) won a Christopher Award for “artistic
excellence in books affirming the highest values of
the human spirit.”

His most recent book, The
Race to Save the Lord God Bird (Melanie Kroupa
Books / Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004), received the Boston
Globe–Horn Book Award, and was named a Top
Ten American Library Association Best Book for Young
Adults among many additional honors. We Were There,
Too!: Young People in U.S. History (Melanie Kroupa
Books / Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001) was a finalist for
the National Book Award. In addition, it was dubbed
a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and
an International Reading Association Teacher’s
Choice.

Phillip Hoose was born in South
Bend, Indiana, and grew up in the towns of South Bend,
Angola, and Speedway, Indiana. He was educated at Indiana
University and the Yale School of Forestry. He lives
in Portland, Maine.

EXCERPT

Excerpt from CLAUDETTE
COLVIN: TWICE TOWARDS JUSTICE by Phillip Hoose

Rebellion was on my mind
that day. All during February we’d been talking
about people who had taken stands. We had been studying
the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class. I
knew I had rights. I had paid my fare the same as
white passengers. I knew the rule—that you didn’t
have to get up for a white person if there were no
were no empty seats left on the bus—and there
weren’t. But it wasn’t about that. I was
thinking, Why should I have to get up just because
a driver tells me to, or just because I’m black?
Right then, I decided I wasn’t gonna take it
anymore. I hadn’t planned it out, but my decision
was built on a lifetime of nasty experiences.

After the other students
got up, there were three empty seats in my row, but
that white woman still wouldn’t sit down—not
even across the aisle from me. That was the whole
point of segregation rules—it was all symbolic—blacks
had to be behind whites. If she sat down
in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her.
So she had to keep standing until I moved back. The
motorman yelled again, louder: “Why are you
still sittin’ there?” I didn’t get
up, and I didn’t answer him. It got real quiet
on the bus. A white rider yelled from the front, “You
got to get up!” A girl named Margaret Johnson
answered from the back, “She ain’t got
to do nothin’ but stay black and die.”

The white woman kept standing
over my seat. The driver shouted, “Gimme that
seat!” then “Get up, gal!” I stayed
in my seat, and I didn’t say a word.